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There has been no consensus on the issue of “Who is an educated Jew?” for more than two hundred years.

If one were to have posed the question in 1750, say in Poland, the answer would have been obvious. The educated Jew was a mature male who had devoted his life to talmudic study, debating fine points of halakha [Jewish law] in yeshiva [a school for rabbinical studies] and the beit midrash [house of study]. He was familiar with all of the classic rabbinic texts and their commentaries, the rishonim and the aharonim [earlier and later commentators], and the languages in which they were written–Hebrew and Aramaic–in addition to the Jewish vernacular that he spoke (in Poland, Yiddish, of course).

No women were given such an education, because the teaching of classical religious texts in Hebrew to women was neither halakhically nor socially legitimated; it was also irrelevant to their roles within the family and society. While regional variations in learning styles and in the details of the curriculum existed, the substance of what educated Jews should know was widely shared in the Jewish world.

The Influence of the Enlightenment

That shared commitment to a curriculum, and therefore to a vision of Jewish knowledge, was irretrievably disrupted with the social and political changes that occurred at the end of the 18th century. The Western states’ desire to reshape the socioeconomic and cultural configuration of their Jewish populations, and the emergence of a cohort of Jewish intellectuals and businessmen who were eager to respond to the opportunities that integration into the larger society seemed to promise, led to a sharp dissent from the consensus about Jewish learning that had prevailed, at least within Ashkenazi communities in Europe. For a growing number of Jews, the talmid hokhem [as described above] was no longer the model of the educated Jew.

Dr. Paula Hyman is Lucy Moses Professor of Modern Jewish History at Yale University. Among her published works are Gender and Assimilation in Modern Jewish History (University of Washington Press)and The Jews of Modern France (University of California Press).

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